The idealized American system is a rather liberal
everyone-for-himself economic free-for-all, in which "the system" is intended to make
it so that if everyone acts "selfishly," it'll all work out for the public
good. In Canada, we don't trust that theory so much, so the government gets
involved more frequently, and in general people take a somewhat more
"moralistic" outlook even in business decisions.

Both systems have their good and bad sides, but the resulting style
is very different, which I will explain in terms of my experience at Subway
(the food chain) in Canada and in Seattle. In Canada, you go to Subway, and
they make you a sandwich according to your specifications. In Seattle, the
person who made my sandwich was totally insane and made a
perfect sandwich according to my specifications faster than I've ever
seen anyone make a sandwich in my life. You could barely even see his
hands, he was so fast. I'm not making this up.

Now, I don't go to the U.S. very often, so I don't know if this is typical
or not. But imagine it is: the idea is that, because everyone is being
selfish, they become hypercompetitive: not only do store managers
have to outdo the other restaurant chains, but maybe they try to outdo other
Subway outlets as well. If you can get your sandwich twice as fast here as
at the place two blocks away, maybe you'll choose their store instead of the
other one. So they focus on customer service. Figuring it out was all a
bit circular, but in the end it's not indirect at all: being selfish
equates to being as good to the customer as possible. That's
selfish?

In Canada, people are more laid back and they don't worry about competition
as much. The result is nobody particularly cares how fast they serve me my
sandwich. In fact, if the Sandwich Ace from Seattle showed up and tried to
work here, people would probably look at him funny: he makes the other
employees look bad. The unselfish thing for him to do would be to
slow down and not rock the boat, resulting in worse customer service
overall. That's unselfish?

Which system is more selfish then, really? Is it the one we thought it was?

BarCamp, Advogato, and Self-selection

I went to BarCampWaterloo a
couple of weeks ago and it was quite entertaining: a small, interesting
group of people, just like I like.

The problem is, that doesn't make any sense.

In general, communities that are good and interesting and
widely applicable tend to start off well, and then explode into
hypergrowth until they're no longer manageable and most of the people there
are just annoying and all the fun is gone. Take the Linux kernel developers
(it was possible to follow their mailing list, once, even if it wasn't your
full time job), or Debian, or actually even
This Whole
Internet Thing. Impromptu communities (I wanted to say "online
communities", but BarCamp isn't, exactly) tend to be in one of two states:
growing or dying, and growing typically leads eventually to hypergrowth.
The best you generally hope for is either slow explosion or slow death, so
that it can be fun while it lasts.

The typical way to slow your community's growth sufficiently is to limit
your topic area, so fewer people are interested. Forget the linux-kernel or
debian-devel mailing lists; try linux-fsdevel or debian-apache instead.

What's weird about this is that I have two as-yet-unexplained
counterexamples: Advogato, which claims
to be a web site connecting "free software developers" (how restrictive is
that?) and BarCamp, which generally claims to be "about Web 2.0"
(nobody even knows what that is!) but in which anybody can show up
and present about anything even remotely relevant.

Why, then, did I find that the majority of stuff produced by both
communities was interesting to me? Certainly I'm weird, because the
majority of people wouldn't have found them interesting at all. But that's
the point. The communities created are self selecting and quite
restrictive, but it's not selected by topic area. It's something
else. Perhaps BarCamp simply selects for people who don't think
deliberately failing to plan your conference in advance is a stupid idea.
And that's a pretty small group of people - and they're pretty compatible
with each other.

(This concept of people connecting better based more on style than content
relates to my earlier comments on literacy.)

NaNoWriMo

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd
type a little faster.
-- Isaac Asimov

This is a pre-announcement of my intention to join this year in National Novel Writing Month, in which
each foolish participant attempts to write a crappy 50,000 word novel in 30
days. Normally I wouldn't bore you with my plans for such things, but
apparently one of the keys to success is setting yourself up to get teased a
lot if you slack off (ie. mutual
motivation). In my case, this is actually by far the most likely
situation since I don't actually have any free time to write a novel in.